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Non-Hydrostatic Regcm4 (Regcm4-NH): Evaluation of Precipitation Statistics at the Convection-Permitting Scale over Different Domains

TitoloNon-Hydrostatic Regcm4 (Regcm4-NH): Evaluation of Precipitation Statistics at the Convection-Permitting Scale over Different Domains
Tipo di pubblicazioneArticolo su Rivista peer-reviewed
Anno di Pubblicazione2022
AutoriStocchi, Paolo, Pichelli Emanuela, Alavez Jose Abraham To, Coppola Erika, Giuliani Graziano, and Giorgi Filippo
RivistaAtmosphere
Volume13
Type of ArticleArticle
ISSN20734433
Abstract

Recent studies over different geographical regions of the world have proven that regional climate models at the convection-permitting scale (CPMs) improve the simulation of precipitation in many aspects, such as the diurnal cycle, precipitation frequency, intensity, and extremes at daily—but even more at hourly—time scales. Here, we present an evaluation of climate simulations with the newly developed RegCM4-NH model run at the convection-permitting scale (CP-RegCM4-NH) for a decade-long period, over three domains covering a large European area. The simulations use a horizontal grid spacing of 3 km and are driven by the ERA-Interim reanalysis through an intermediate driving RegCM4-NH simulation at 12 km grid spacing with parameterized deep convection. The km-scale simulations are evaluated against a suite of hourly observation datasets with high spatial resolutions and are compared to the coarse-resolution driving simulation in order to assess improvements in precipitation from the seasonal to hourly scale. The results show that CP-RegCM4-NH produces a more realistic representation of precipitation than the coarse-resolution simulation over all domains. The most significant improvements were found for intensity, heavy pre-cipitation, and precipitation frequency, both on daily and hourly time scales in all seasons. In general, CP-RegCM4-NH tends to correctly produce more intense precipitation and to reduce the frequency of events compared to the coarse-resolution one. On the daily scale, improvements in CP simulations are highly region dependent, with the best results over Italy, France, and Germany, and the largest biases over Switzerland, the Carpathians, and Greece, especially during the summer seasons. At the hourly scale, the improvement in CP simulations for precipitation intensity and spatial distribution is clearer than at the daily timescale. In addition, the representation of extreme events is clearly improved by CP-RegCM4-NH, particularly at the hourly time scale, although an overestimation over some subregions can be found. Although biases between the model simulations at the km-scale and observations still exist, this first application of CP-RegCM4-NH at high spatial resolution indicates a clear benefit of convection-permitting simulations and encourages further assessments of the added value of km-scale model configurations for regional climate change projections. © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

Note

Cited by: 10; All Open Access, Gold Open Access, Green Open Access

URLhttps://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85131546265&doi=10.3390%2fatmos13060861&partnerID=40&md5=b3d96d811588d3d508663e30008725ee
DOI10.3390/atmos13060861
Citation KeyStocchi2022